Economically speaking, wave power would seem to be a very cheap method of travel for a boat, no? As with everything else in life, there’s yin and there’s yang, give and take, pro and con. In this case, while the cost is cheap, the speed is slow.

Kenichi Horie is a Japanese sailor that embarked on a 4000 mile voyage March 18  2008 from Hawaii to Nippon on his 3 ton boat called the Suntory Mermaid II. This boat is powered by waves which in turn cause two paddles, or fins, at the bow to propel the boat forward at a speed up to 5 knots. After about a month of travel, he’s recently reported that he’s making progress of 100km per day and the progress report from the link below shows he’s about 1/3 of the way home.

It’s expected to take this adventurer about 75 days to reach his destination, to put it into perspective a diesel powered boat would take about 10 days.

The reason he’s doing this is to promote this technology and encourage further research into wave power with a goal of one day seeing commercial ships adopting a greener method of locomotion.

Track his progress here.

Tip of the hat to Kenichi, I wish him well and will follow his progress closely.

Treehugger.com tells us about the new hotness in ‘green funerals’ - biodegradable coffins.

The problem with biodegradable caskets is that if CSI ever needs to exhume the body, any potential evidence to be discovered would likely be destroyed due to the accelerated exposure of the body to the elements.

Interested in seeing the eCoffin product line? Jump to the Ecoffin parent company in the UK, and check out the hand woven urns.

I don’t know if the BBC is pulling a fast one as an April Fool’s joke or if this is supposedly a serious application of tidal forces and wind power to produce energy on demand when it’s needed most by first storing the potential energy in ‘wind bags’ on the sea floor.

Confused already? Head on over to the BBC and let the confusion continue…

The Australian News re-prints a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. I suspect we’ll be hearing more and more like this as we collect additional data.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant."

Duffy: "It’s not only that it’s not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there’s any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it’s put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."

Ecochick answers the age old question: ‘How can I recycle batteries?‘

Full of tips on how to properly dispose of everything from watch batteries to car batteries and probably everything in between.